This impressive and important annual publication follows the general pattern established by earlier volumes in this series of providing the specialist practitioner and student of international arbitration with a comprehensive source of arbitration texts and materials. The series began in 1976 and since then a volume of the Yearbook has been published each year under the auspices of ICCA and with the co-operation of the TMC Asser Institute for International Law, The Hague. In 1983, ICCA authorized the publication of a separate loose-leaf series of National Reports on the arbitration laws and practice of the nations of the world. Such National Reports had previously been published in the Yearbooks and until 1987 they continued to be so published. But with the separate publication as from 1983 of the International Handbook on Commercial Arbitration under the general editorship of Pieter Sanders and the consequent collection of the National Reports within the covers of this handbook, the specialist is now provided with a dual source of arbitration materials. The stature of the two publications can hardly be over-estimated and it is right that the value of this work should have been acknowledged in an English reported decision: see Biakh v. Hyundai [1988] 1 Lloyd’s Rep. 187, 189, per Steyn, J.

The Yearbooks have traditionally been organized into different sections or parts so as to maintain a balance between different aspects of the subject. These will be mentioned briefly.

Part I of the Yearbooks, traditionally set out in Part IA, new or revised National Reports, and in Part IB, “updatings” of National Reports. Thus, Volume XII, the Yearbook for 1987, contains (at pp. 3 ff.) a National Report on The Netherlands by Dr Albert Jan van den Berg (also published in April 1987 as Supplement to No. 7 to the Handbook). This report is of particular interest as it consists of a commentary on the recent Netherlands Arbitration Act 1986 (the text of which is printed in Part IV at pp. 370 ff). It is sufficient for the purposes of this review to draw attention to two matters of some topical interest; first, the claim is made by Dr van den Berg that “the Act is to a large extent compatible with the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration of 1985”, although some differences can be noted and the legislation is certainly much more detailed and applies without distinction to both domestic and international arbitration; secondly, those who deplore the absence of any third-party procedure in English arbitration procedure will be interested to see (p. 21) that, while the recent Netherlands statute contains an Article entitled “Third parties”, it is still a pre-condition to the third-party procedure that both the proposed third party and also both the original parties to the arbitration must have agreed to the joinder. There is also in the 1987 volume a new National Report on Spain. As from 1988, however, it has been decided, in order to avoid duplication and to utilize the pages of the Yearbook most productively, that new or updated National Reports will no longer appear in full in the Yearbooks. For English readers this inevitable decision has perhaps one disadvantage, namely that it is necessary to go to the Handbook to find the distinguished recent National Report on England by Sir Johan Steyn and V. V. Veeder, Q.C. (Supplement 9 to the Handbook, published 1988). This report, which deserves a wider publication, has interesting comments on a number of topics, including multi-party disputes, the separability of the arbitration clause and many others.

Part II of the Yearbook begins with a section that contains a record of selected awards